Are you running ads on Google and noticing that your ads are being shown across low-quality websites, mobile apps and YouTube channels eating up your budget and delivering poor-quality conversions?
You’re in the right place. To get the most out of your budget, you need to control where your ads appear. You can do this by manually excluding those placements, or you can let Adinity AI handle it for you by automatically blocking irrelevant ones.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to exclude irrelevant placements, and even build a Google Ads placement negative list to prevent wasted budget. Let’s dive in!
Why Excluding Bad Placements Matters
The Google Display Network (GDN) allows advertisers to show ads on millions of websites, mobile apps, and YouTube videos. However, not all placements benefit your campaign. Low-quality placements can:
- 💸 Waste your ad budget on irrelevant traffic
- 🤖 Skew conversion rates due to bot traffic
- 📉 Reduce your return on investment (ROI)
- ⚠️ Harm your brand reputation by appearing on inappropriate sites
- 📈 Increase your cost per acquisition (CPA)
By excluding low-quality placements, you ensure your ads appear only on high-quality and relevant websites.
How to Identify and Remove Low-Quality Placements
1. Review Your Placement Report
To start, access your Google Ads Placement Report by following these steps:
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- Click on Campaigns and select Insights and Reports.
- Go to When and where ads showed.
- Click on Where ads showed to review where your ads have appeared.
Now that you have access to the placements data, you can sort it to easily identify low-quality placements where you’ve been spending money. Sort the report by cost, impressions, or clicks, starting with the highest spend or click volume.
Alternatively, you can search by placement name—for example, if you want to exclude gaming related websites, filter to placements that contain the word “game” search for and selected ones as shown below.
2. Exclude Irrelevant Placements
Once you identify poor-performing placements, you can exclude them straight away on the platform, either at the Campaign level or Ad Group level. However, for low-quality placements, we always recommend excluding them at the Account level to ensure these websites aren’t served across any other campaigns. To exclude at the account level, please follow these steps:
- In the Campaigns area, click on Audiences, Keywords, and Content.
- Click on Content and scroll down to Exclusions.
- Click on Edit Exclusions.
- Now, choose the level at which you want to exclude them: Account level, Campaign level, or Ad Group level. We usually recommend Account level to ensure these low-quality placements do not serve your ads again.
- Click Enter, insert the placements you want to exclude at the Account level, click Add Placements, and then click Save.
By taking this step, you will effectively exclude irrelevant placements that don’t align with your target audience.
3. Build a Google Ads Placement Negative List
If, instead of adding negative placements at the Account level, you prefer a more flexible approach, you can create an exclusion list and apply it to all your campaigns.
To set up a placement negative list:
- Navigate to Tools > Shared Library > Exclusion Lists.
- Click on the + sign to create a Placement Exclusion List.
- Add the URLs of the websites you want to block.
- Apply the list to all your campaigns.
By using this approach, you won’t need to manually exclude placements for each campaign.
Best Practices for Managing Google Ads Placement Exclusions
- Regularly monitor your placement reports to identify new low-quality placements.
- Use automation tools like Adinity AI to flag and exclude poor-performing sites automatically, without spending excessive time analysing placements.
- Exclude entire categories like mobile apps or game related placements to maintain brand safety.
- Test and optimise continuously by adjusting exclusions based on campaign performance.
Take Action: Optimise Your Placements with Our Free Placement Analyser Tool!
To make things easier for you, we’ve created a Free Google Ads Placement Exclusion Tool that helps you streamline your exclusions and optimise your ad performance.
Final Thoughts
By implementing Google Ads placement exclusions, you can eliminate low-quality traffic, reduce wasted ad spend, and improve your overall campaign performance. Whether you’re blocking placements one by one or using negative placement lists, this is a time-consuming task that shouldn’t take up much of your valuable time. That’s why Adinity AI is here to help you get all of this done while you focus on what really matters!
Try it now for FREE and take back control of your ad placements!
